The AAFP and seven other national and international family medicine organizations envision a future in which one in four U.S. medical students pursues a career in family medicine.

Accomplishing this ambitious goal is essential to ending the primary care workforce shortage and will require more than doubling the rate of U.S. medical students pursuing family medicine at the time of initiative’s launch in 2018. Efforts will empower family physicians and family medicine allies in and outside of medicine who care about building a robust and diverse primary care workforce to inspire, support, and encourage students and create and advocate for policies and standards that advance primary care.

Family medicine is uniquely called to see this work through. Family physicians make up the majority of the primary care physician workforce and mirror the geographic distribution of the U.S. population more closely—practicing in more rural and urban underserved communities—than any other health professional workforce. At a time when a shortage of more than 52,000 primary care physicians is predicted by 2025 and experts call for an increase in the proportion of physicians in the U.S. practicing primary care from 32% to 40%, the family medicine community is dedicated to doing its part to meet the need.

The 25x2030 collaborative empowers the family medicine organizations to maximize their impact to generate the family medicine workforce needed to provide accessible, quality, affordable, and inclusive care. Organizations will collaborate in new ways, drawing on the expertise and creativity of the collective.

Thought leaders, stakeholders, and executive staff of the organizations met in August 2018 to kick off their work. They agreed to leverage a framework called Collective Impact to guide the infrastructure and development of their collaboration. The AAFP provides program and project management leadership for the initiative.

A steering committee consisting of representatives from each of the organizations guides the vision and strategy and supports aligned activities of the organizations.

Steering committee members include both staff and members/diplomates of each of the organizations.